Thoughts on books, reading and publishing from the staff and friends of the Tattered Cover Book Store.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Liz and Michele Are Recommending...

A hypnotic, spellbinding novel set in Greece and Africa, where a young Liberian woman reckons with a haunted past.

On a remote island in the Aegean, Jacqueline is living alone in a
cave accessible only at low tide. With nothing to protect her from the
elements, and with the fabric between herself and the world around her
increasingly frayed, she is permeated by sensory experiences of
remarkable intensity: the need for shade in the relentless heat of the
sun-baked island; hunger and the occasional bliss of release from it;
the exquisite pleasure of diving into the sea. The pressing physical
realities of the moment provide a deeper relief: the euphoric
obliteration of memory and, with it, the unspeakable violence she has
seen and from which she has miraculously escaped.

Slowly, irrepressibly, images from a life before this violence begin
to resurface: the view across lush gardens to a different sea; a gold
Rolex glinting on her father’s wrist; a glass of gin in her mother’s
best crystal; an adoring younger sister; a family, in the moment before
their fortunes were irrevocably changed. Jacqueline must find the
strength to contend with what she has survived or tip forward into
full-blown madness.

Visceral and gripping, extraordinary in its depiction of physical and spiritual hungers, Alexander Maksik’s A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel about ruin and faith, barbarism and love, and the
devastating memories that contain the power both to destroy us and to
redeem us.

The end of the world was only the beginning.

In his internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Passage, Justin
Cronin constructed an unforgettable world transformed by a government
experiment gone horribly wrong. Now the scope widens and the intensity
deepens as the epic story surges forward with . . .

In the present day, as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers
navigate the chaos. Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so
shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to
plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her.
Kittridge, known to the world as “Last Stand in Denver,” has been forced
to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected,
armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so
far. April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely
through a landscape of death and ruin. These three will learn that they
have not been fully abandoned—and that in connection lies hope, even on
the darkest of nights.

One hundred years in the future, Amy
and the others fight on for humankind’s salvation . . . unaware that the
rules have changed. The enemy has evolved, and a dark new order has
arisen with a vision of the future infinitely more horrifying than man’s
extinction. If the Twelve are to fall, one of those united to vanquish
them will have to pay the ultimate price.

A heart-stopping thriller rendered with masterful literary skill, The Twelve is a grand and gripping tale of sacrifice and survival.